hello! my name is nicole and i’m a member of Woodbine Health Autonomy. I came to the group after years of intensive academic work, existing in cut throat, very hierarchal institutions, and ignoring my own well-being inevitably caught up with me. i was forced to reckon with how the professional and cultural spaces we value most in our society push the labor of social reproduction into the private, individual sphere–even as feminist academics talk about a lot about care, and even as “health” and “wellness” are now pervasive buzzwords and boutique amenities accessible to those who can afford them. i’m a writer, scholar, and an amateur herbalist. these days i think a lot about the history of the body under capitalism–in particular about gender, trauma, desire, and increasingly the history of medicine. Woodbine Health Autonomy has given me a space to think about anti-capitalist infrastructures of care as we move toward building our own. Please ask me any questions you might have, and I really look forward to planning, convening, and scheming with all of you!!
Welcome Nicole!
Hello @nicole, welcome from me too. Woodbine is on a big quest (intimidatingly so, even), so any extra intellectual firepower is sure to be welcome. What kind of an academic did you use to be (or still are)? What are you trying to build within the Woodbine framework?
hi Nicole !
I’m also very interested on those topics. I recently read a zine called “Burning Women - the European Witch Hunts, enclosures and the rise of capitalism”, by Lady Stardust.
(find it here : http://we.riseup.net/assets/246955/Burning+Women.pdf)
Well, the content is summarized in the title, but it also talks about the rise of medicine as opposed to the grassroots feminine knowledge of herbalism.
I heard about a bigger book called “Caliban and the Witch”, by Silvia Federici that develops the subject further, but I couldn’t find the time to read it yet.
During some of the sessions today I got the feeling that several people in a room share same values and ideals, but are coming at things using really different vocabularies for whatever reasons. To understand one another we need some kind of glossary of terms so a reading list would be helpful as a starting point.